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I’m listening to Califone - Heron King Blues for the first time in probably almost 20 years and it’s amazing. This thing is so warm you might think you put a sweater on instead of an album.

Edit: dumb garbage deleted

Earth - Primitive and Deadly

Yeah, this is a good one. From The Zodiacal Light is one of my favorite tracks.

Up by REM is not an album of note but I did just hear it for the first time.  

Far less "electronica"-influenced than I was lead to believe, they're really spreading their wings here. Yet in the end it feels less ambitious and meaningful than anything I've ever heard from them up to this point.

Michael Stipe's vocals just don't really gel with any of the music, not in the way they need to for any of this to really work. I'm not a music teacher, I'm not a vocal coach, I can't explain or justify why I feel that way but I do.



I kind of get what they're going for here, maybe this even feels ahead of its time, yet it's also kind of... weightless in a way that doesn't feel like it's gonna work as an album opener for any band? No way you can really stick this anywhere else on the album that's not going to just suck the energy out of the whole thing. Then again, that's 2024 undo's opinion, he and everyone else would have had amazing amounts of patience for this kind of thing back in 1998.



I don't feel this one bit! No interesting melodies in this song at all. The vocal melody is nonexistent and the effects/multi-tracking on the vocals only makes everything worse!



He sounds like a girl on this song, at least that gives it a flavor.



Nine songs into this thing and we finally get to a song that feels like a meaningful single (yet it wasn't actually one after all). Still feels like it would have been one of the lesser songs on New Adventures in Hi-Fi. At this point I'm desperate for something as simple as "Be Mine" or "New Test Lepur." Just some confident guitars and relaxed vocals that leaves me feeling like I'm listening to a band that wants to be playing songs, that's all I ask for.

This would have bummed me out so much if I had made a point to buy it back when it came out. Thank goodness that didn't happen!

I’m playing everything by Suicide on a loop.
I’ve tried to get into them a couple times in the past and it never really stuck (probably a shocker!).
But it’s sticking big this time.
I feel so many threads between this music and the shit that I’ve long been obsessed with (David Lynch stuff, warped/queer Americana, straight up non-warped Americana, weirdos screening and/or crooning).

In my search for the coolest jam band music I’ve stumbled upon… King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard?

Amazing stuff here:


The visualizer is a bit cliche but the music is great. Just play it and don’t watch it maybe.

Ned Braden wrote:I’m playing everything by Suicide on a loop.

Everything from the album, A Way of Life reminds me of some specific thing...

Ned Braden wrote:David Lynch stuff... weirdos screaming and/or crooning.

I hear the song Surrender and it absolutely feels like it should be playing while young Ben and Jerry Horne watch their baby sitter dance with a flashlight




Some absolutely top notch weirdo crooning going on during Jukebox Baby, and the song makes me think of Holiday Road from Vacation.


Oh and I was digging the instrumental song playing during the credits of Love Lies Bleeding (rad ass motherfucking movie imhfo) and I looked and realized it was a Martin Rev track from 1985 which I now realize sounds just like the first song in this post.

still got it

Is this that guy from SOMB who used to write song parodies?

I long for the days of event listening.

Anyway, this Beyoncé record is pretty cool. I doubt I’ll be listening to it anywhere near as much as I did Renaissance, but I dig the flex. I like that Willie pops in to say words.

Yeah, I will definitely be passing on this Beyoncé record, I'm afraid.

I listened to it. It's nice enough. Felt kinda cool to know I was listening to it along with about a billion other people at the same time, but that's all it's gonna be for me. I think it's pretty hard to say something important in your music when you have that much money.

I didn’t listen to the album but hearing the couple singles that came recently I have this sinking feeling that the album will sound like lil Wayne’s rock album or that kid cud I Kanye thing that came out a few years ago. It’s nice when artists want to try new genres but you have to have a level of admiration and respect to sound right in my mind. Weens country album comes to mind, they went and got Elvis backing band to record the thing. In interviews Beyoncé has said that this music is her life music… ok, then why didn’t it really show up at all in your music until you collaborate with Jack white? Just getting Willie and dolly, arguably country musics two living saints, to talk on a couple of songs is an almost laughable way to get cred. Had anyone other than Beyoncé done this, I think critics would have skewered them. Can you imagine Mitski or LANA tapping either of those two for their most recent albums?? I hope this doesn’t come off the wrong way, I want Beyoncé to make a cool country record, but like Michael k sorta said, it’s hard to be a billionaire and have any type of authenticity.

I listened to the Beyoncé album yesterday & just thought it sounded like a new Beyoncé album that wasn’t as strong as her previous albums. There is country influences throughout but only a handful that struck me as overtly trying to be country. Those were kinda embarrassing for sure.

The last several tracks are very good but it’s just a long fucking album & you have to be a true fan or I guess this music speaks to you on a different level to want to go back for repeated listens.

I don’t know what to expect from LDR’s country album. But I’ll say I feel the same way listening to the new Waxahatchee album that I do listening to Beyonces country songs. And that feeling is this shit is corny as hell.

I saw KA Baird perform a couple weeks back with Horse Lords. Not together, on the same bill. Anyway, I am listening to her album Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos and I remembered that I wanted to talk about that performance.

It might have been one of the most confident, amazing, unique, and right up my alley in terms of aesthetic, performances i've witnessed. For those of you who don't know, she was the head of the short lived, but ridiculously talented and amazing, Spires That In The Sunset Rise. During this solo performance she played on an almost empty stage with a spotlight directly on her, and proceeded to flail, hurl, spit, and jerk all around stage. During some moments she would 'spit' into the crowd, like a shamans tequila blessing, covering us with psychedelic ear dust. Her mic had this effect where everything she did had a weird 'tail at the end. Sometimes a quick delay effect, sometimes a blast of noise, I shit you not guys, it was truly something else. Don't get me wrong, Horse Lords were incredible too, but Ka Baird left me with my mouth on the floor. Check the music on band camp, it 'sounds like the performance' but seeing it is the thing. She was shoving the mic up her ass bros, and the look on her face was so funny, oh man. trust me, go see.

i am in so many feelings and i do not envision a moment where i escape from them

do you guys remember when this was a thing for like two weeks on JDFF (or maybe it was even post-JDFF i dunno)?



I hear this and it just fully contributes to the deepest danks of the feeling that I am feeling at the moment that I hear it; and with that in mind, I just wish I were happy tonight.

Ned, your one of the most solid bros out there, things will turn around, keep ya head up.

I don't know if that album has fallen off in the last few years, I never hear anybody talking about it anymore.

Maybe no one ever talked about it at all outside of a small cluster of message boards and its status as a classic, or at least something on par with Hex or Laughing Stock, only exists in my mind?

I have the CD on a special mini-shelf in my "listening area" that I never really use and it's been catching my eye quite a bit in the past week or so.

Ned Braden wrote:I’m playing everything by Suicide on a loop.

I was going to go see them when I was 21 or something but I drove to the wrong venue and it was a jazz solo concert where most of the audience was sitting on the floor (to this day I'm not sure if this was common behavior or a disrespectful audience). So I missed my chance to see them in the flesh!

I probably reviewed the final album they put out and given it a 7 or something. I should probably listen to them all once again soon! It's been a long time.

undo wrote:

I can only guess why but every time I see this cover, it takes me a second to remember that it's an album cover and not a Nintendo 64 game.

This is a terrible music video.

At best, it has not aged well.

I can't quite believe I lived through a period where this was an aesthetic.

undo wrote:

This is a terrible music video.

At best, it has not aged well.

I can't quite believe I lived through a period where this was an aesthetic.

So much from the early 2000s hasn’t aged well and that decade was just fucked up altogether.

I recall this album and YHF being heavily written about due to their release timing around 9/11 and people feeling it captured “the moment”.

I wasn’t shaving my head bald yet and can’t even look at pictures of myself with hair anymore much less listen to the music from that time.

Watching the video I am transported to video/animation software from that time. I believe that effect where the camera is floating around a bunch of images was a ‘filter’ in adobe animate. I liked interpol early on, I still think New York Kids is a pretty good song, just like Yeah Yeah Yeahs Maps is a good song. Liars and the whole dance punk thing was dumb. I think it was a needed step to market actual dance music which went on to take over indie rock and morph into EDM by the end of the decade. But relistening to House of Jealous Lovers makes me cringe a bit. I was going to UIC at that time and the whole New York thing seemed cool but I was also interested in this ‘micro house’ thing that was bubbling at the time. Kinda glad I went that route, just think of bgwaves reviewing vampire weekend.

Strokes are great.

Some Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes, even Interpol songs still "hold up." I checked out from Liars a long time ago and there might have been a lot after the first two albums I just never even gave a cursory listen to (some people say it's great) but there's something that strikes me as sort of opportunist and coattail-riding about the way they appropriated everything they did, it never sat right with me once the immediate aftermath of that moment--me at my dumbest and most naive, too-was over with.

I never would have bet on LCD Soundsystem being the artist from this time period that would fall the furthest from grace for me personally yet somehow even the most untouchable highs just don't resonate with me anymore and their worst stuff is just unlistenable to me at this point.

Talking trash about The Rapture just feels like punching down years after it would have meant anything at all to say they weren't, like, amazing. I got caught up in their gimmick and I can't really explain myself other than it was the times, man.

It's one thing for an era not to age the way that you thought it would, it's a whole other thing to feel like this about it 20 years later.

Nick wrote:I recall this album and YHF being heavily written about due to their release timing around 9/11 and people feeling it captured “the moment”.

I listened to YHF a few months ago and I think it's pretty great. Who knows when I'll spin it again?

Maybe tomorrow

^More or less how I always felt about The Liars.

And I think 2 summers ago Tweedy was on XRT talking about YHF and I mean, yeah, lol, but I actually listened to the interview and the songs, and they were pretty great? But I was really all about that record that spring and summer it came out.

Semi-related to this discussion: No one ever called this movement "indie sleaze" at the time, right? I guess it's possible I heard the term in 2004 and thought it was dumb and refused to acknowledge it, but I honestly have no recollection of it at all.